Bitfrost: the OLPC DRM model

Posted Feb 9, 2007 9:47 UTC (Fri) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

They stated the goal is to eliminate the chance of people making of with 'pallets' of laptops. I take that to mean you don't want people to hijack a shipment or bribe their way into a position were they obtain large numbers of laptops all at once in a attempt to get them for sale on the black market.

So the bitfrost is designed to prevent theft by requiring the developer key. Sure you could probably steal one or two laptops and get them unlocked, but you couldn't probably steal a few hundred unless you have the help of part of the government that is suppose to be the ones in charge of distributing them.

Phoning in 20-30 laptops at a time is a easy way to get busted very quickly. I figure you wouldn't be able to get even a sizable minority of them unlocked before they bricked themselves.

Then the second half is malware prevention, of course. Prevent people from tampering with the Bios and spreading effective viruses/worms to attack a 'monoculture' of these laptops similar to the botnets we have now of Windows XP machines.

Plus it pretty much allows people to muck around with the machine as much as they'd like and not have to worry about perminately brick them, unless they spring for the developer key (which would open them up to potential malware, theft, or bad bioses. But assuming people only interested in the key are people that are going to more or less know what they are doing, then it shouldn't be a big deal)

That is, of course, if it's only requirement is a 'phone home'. There could definately be a big hunk of Bitfrost that I don't know/understand or am glossing over in my ignorance.